No Kennedy Him
Filed Under Madness, Media | Leave a Comment
Story floating around the InterWebs this afternoon — seems Mitt Romney is an asshole from way back.
The Washington Post has a piece up on Romney’s creepy ways while a prep-school student, instances which included an episode where he led a cluster-attack on this kid — others held the boy while Mitt scissored off his hair: “It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
Romney hadn’t no memory of it this morning.
Reportedly by this afternoon, though, the episode had somehow re-entered his mental faculties.
(Illustration found here).
Earlier today (Via TPM): Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul told the Post that Romney had no recollection of the incidents in question, which she said “seem exaggerated,” and added that “Anyone who knows Mitt Romney knows that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body.”
Meanwhile, Romney later went on Fox News Radio (via the San Francisco Chronicle ): “Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.”
Clearly, but then, maybe perhaps.
And from ABC News: He added that “homosexuality was the furthest thing from his mind” when it came to the jokes he played on classmates. He laughed off the 45-year-old anecdotes during the radio interview today.
The Post article has tipped some cups — should be interesting to see how this plays out amongst the MSM and the voters.
The name of the kid that Romney gave an ‘vicious’ haircut to was John Lauber.
He was later kicked out of school after being caught smoking a cigarette, and from the detailed Post story, despite some cruel times, lived an amazing, adventurous life.
A snapshot:
He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders.
After an extreme fit of temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan.
Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq.
His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base.
He died there of liver cancer that December.
According to his sister, Betsy, Lauber “had a glorious sense of the absurd.”
Yes, the very thought of Mitt Romney as president does seem so senseless as to be laughable.
Dreamless Falling
Filed Under Bullshit, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
Creatures of the future in the hardcore words from the dangerous mind of Dick Mourdock, who whipped Dick Lugar in Indiana on Tuesday:
“What I’ve said about compromise and bipartisanship is I hope to build a conservative majority in the United States Senate so that bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government, reduce the bureaucracy, lower taxes and get American moving again.”
In that the reality of the US government’s dysfunction.
(Illustration found here).
The so-called Tea Party movement, which began a scant three years ago, is most-likely the most-destructive force in US governing — Matt Taibbi wrote about it best two years ago: Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them.
The problem, though, is that these people are the real ‘shock and awe‘ on the lives of the mass of US peoples, leaving no doubt there’s no compassion there in terms of every-day Americans, even if they unwittingly cut their own ignorant throats.
In a few years, maybe less, the Republican Party will be no more — even if George Jr. was an asshole, at least he stayed within the bounds of a somewhat concern for a common human decency, but the Tea Party doesn’t at all.
Former Senator John Danforth, a Republican, on Lugar’s defeat: An effort by some, and apparently a large number, 60% in Indiana, to purge the Republican Party and to create something that’s ideologically pure and intolerant of anybody who does not agree with them — not just on general principles, but right across the board.
The Tea Party is indeed full of delusional shit.
History created the deep-poo the US is wading around in nowadays, from President Obama’s election in 2008 (and the rise of the public lie via Sarah Palin) and the Republican party itself only after Obama’s defeat, not governing — all that after effects of a country held in a nasty, incompetent grip for nearly a decade by George Jr. and his boys.
Obama’s win was indeed a change, which swept the country but not like none of us had ever figured.
The country was already experiencing a divide before the 2008 election, but it’s really shown itself the last three years.
One of the better overviews of our modern times came from George Packer writing in the New Yorker in a piece posted last September, aptly titled ‘Coming Apart‘ — US peoples never had the chance for internal digestion of the future.
A few snips:
The events of September 11th, as grim as they were, offered the prospect of employment to a generation of working-class Americans who were born too late for good factory jobs.
If the Bush Administration’s “global war on terror” had gone the way of the Second World War, mass mobilization in the armed forces, combined with mass production in the factories, would have revitalized a stagnant national economy and produced a postwar boom.
This didn’t happen.
Without a draft, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been fought by less than one per cent of the population.
The Pentagon, which wanted to keep those wars limited and short, avoided planning for large-scale manufacturing, even after its necessity became obvious.
In 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was questioned by a scout from the Tennessee National Guard about the lack of quality armor for his unit’s trucks.
“You go to war with the army you have,” Rumsfeld replied.
Even after this remark became infamous, the production of armor proceeded slowly, almost grudgingly, and troops and vehicles remained dangerously exposed for years.
Most new defense jobs at home turned out to be in data collection and intelligence, which required college degrees and specialized knowledge, or in the low-paying realm of airport and building security.
…
In a two-year period, the House’s impeachment of Bill Clinton and the Florida recount that was stopped by a similarly divided Supreme Court, handing the Presidency to Bush, had suddenly made America’s great democratic institutions seem flimsy and entirely partisan.
During the 2000 election campaign, the news media came up with a new, color-coded way of dividing the country—into red and blue.
On the economic front, America was in a recession, the dot-com bubble having already burst.
A culture of speculation and debt on Wall Street was beginning to suffer from its own lopsidedness, with unprecedented fortunes in technology and finance accumulating at the top, and incomes in the middle flattening out, as blue-collar jobs moved offshore.
The problem of income inequality was worsening, thanks to enormous tax cuts that had been passed into law that spring.
The budget surplus of the Clinton years was vanishing.
…
The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven’t stopped being surprised.
The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it’s almost impossible to define victory.
You can’t document the war’s progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense.
A country used to a feeling of command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction, swinging wildly between passive fear and fevered, often thoughtless, activity, at a high cost to its self-confidence.
Each new episode has been hard, if not impossible, to predict: from the first instant of the attacks to the collapse of the towers; from the decision to invade Iraq to the failure to find a single weapon of mass destruction; from the insurgency to the surge; from the return of the Taliban to the Arab Spring to the point-blank killing of bin Laden; from the financial crisis to the landslide election of Barack Obama and his nearly immediate repudiation.
…
The Bush Administration collapsed in the late summer of 2005 — not in Falluja or Kandahar but in the submerged neighborhoods of New Orleans.
The response to Hurricane Katrina gave Americans such a devastating picture of official failure that it suggested something fatally wrong with an entire approach to governing.
Iraq, of course, had provided evidence of high-level arrogance, incompetence, and neglect for two years, and Afghanistan for even longer than that, but, because these places were far away and American troops were risking their lives to serve the nation, the public wasn’t ready to withdraw its support.
When the footage came out of the Gulf Coast — when, for the second time in four years, a great American city looked like Kabul or Kinshasa — it was Iraq in fast motion, and right around the corner.
Government at all levels, but especially in Washington, had failed to plan for the worst outcome, even when the entire country saw it coming.
Read the entire piece, it’s long, but well worth the time — the US has near-about folded into itself since Sept. 11, 2001, a time seemingly so far, far away, and so way-long ago.
An American Dream that never was has become a wide-awake nightmare.
Connect The Dots
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Media, Weather | Leave a Comment
Despite all my efforts to keep track of shit, I’d never heard of Climate Impacts Day — the event launched by Bill McKibben’s 350.org — until this morning and was reading Dr. Jeff Masters, where he talks about how climate change is altering our weather in the worse way.
And the entire process is geared toward ‘connecting the dots‘ between all the global extreme weather the last couple of years to climate change — the intent to maybe force asshole politicians to attack global warming like they do gay people.
(Illustration found here).
Apparently, however, we can’t leave it to the MSM — nightly news coverage of climate change has dropped 72 percent between 2009 and 2011 (Media Matters).
Meanwhile, Dr. Masters at his WunderBlog pretty-much sums it up:
Connecting the dots between human-caused climate change and extreme weather events is fraught with difficulty and uncertainty.
One the one hand, the underlying physics is clear — the huge amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide humans have pumped into the atmosphere must be already causing significant changes to the weather.
But the weather has huge natural variations on its own, without climate change.
So, communicators of the links between climate change and extreme weather need to emphasize how climate change shifts the odds.
We’ve loaded the dice towards some types of extreme weather events, by heating the atmosphere to add more heat and moisture.
This can bring more extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy downpours, and intense droughts.
What’s more, the added heat and moisture can change atmospheric circulation patterns, causing meanders in the jet stream capable of bringing longer-lasting periods of extreme weather.
And this shit ain’t gonna stop until…
UPDATE
Yesterday morning, I wrote about the Heartland Institute’s horrifying PR stunt of comparing people who know and understand climate change to Charles Manson and Fidel Castro.
The shit didn’t stick — Heartland pulled the whole project in less than 24 hours.
What assholes!
Read the results at DeSmogBlog.
Anniversary
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Media, Politics | Leave a Comment
Put-down of the day number one — from Juan Cole, pissed at Mitt Romney’s put-down of President Obama’s take-out of Osama bin Laden:
Mitt Romney said Monday that of course he would have taken out Bin Laden and that ‘even Jimmy Carter would have made that call.’
Since Jimmy Carter ordered a brave and risky but failed military mission into Iran, that was a cheap shot on the part of someone who has never had anything to do with the military.
Moreover, Jimmy Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel and played a major role in reducing the number of Africans stricken by the Guinea worm from 3.5 million to 1,100.
So Romney, who has mainly been sending our jobs overseas, isn’t good enough to shine Carter’s shoes.
Furthermore:
The problem with Romney is that when it comes to the Muslim world, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about, and seems intent on alienating 1.5 billion Muslims, a fifth of the world.
He wanted to substitute a crazy conspiracy theory for a tactical approach to getting Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership.
In this regard, the Obama campaign has correctly nailed him, but they haven’t gone far enough in emphasizing the truly creepy character of his obsession with Muslims in general, far beyond the fringe al-Qaeda element.
Romney knows life about as much as Sophia Loren is way-madly in love with me.
This the one-year dateline of Osama’s demise, but in a few weeks will be the 40th anniversary of Watergate — the biggest, internal US historical event this past century, and journalism’s big-clap event.
The two guys who gained way-more-than-fame off the episode — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — are in the news again, this time some stuff in their original reports might might have been a little off kilter and this might have upset the Bob.
(Illustration found here).
In the mid-1970s when I started my journalism career as a lowly police reporter in Montgomery, Alabama, those two Washington Post reporters were the gem in the IBM typewriter ribbon that beckon the pride and neatness of the job for all of us in the trade.
Didn’t like Woodward too much — appeared too much of a button-down asshole — but Bernstein was my kind of guy.
In appearance, he should have been playing bass for The Ramones instead of being in a newsroom, chained-smoked and looked like shit — I could way-relate.
In fact, I tried to emulate Dustin Hoffman playing Bernstein in ‘All the President’s Men.’
Woodward, however, looked the CEO instead one of ‘us’ regular guys in the newsroom.
And while Bernstein went on benders, dated Elizabeth Taylor, recovered from the all that Watergate fame to become a competent older journalist, Woodward has become a mouth-piece for the DC establishment — and has become wealthy.
In put-down of the day number two, Alex Pareene at Salon nails Woodward to a journalism wall of shame:
We now all know, in other words, that Bob Woodward is a sketchy reporter.
This has always been the case.
All of his post-Watergate books feature ridiculous, clearly invented (or “embellished”) internal monologues, and re-creations, with quotation marks, of scenes he couldn’t have witnessed or recorded.
He is shady about his sources, even to his editors, and because he is so well-sourced, he is always sitting on important information that he refuses to divulge, to protect his powerful sources.
His depressing flailing about the periphery of the Plame affair — Woodward was the first journalist to learn that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, and Woodward declined to mention his knowledge to his bosses or anyone else for months after the story broke, for fear of getting subpoenaed — was proof that his balancing of his responsibility to the public and his responsibility to his sources had become, or perhaps always was, severely out of whack.
I think that Woodward has enjoyed a lack of critical attention for years now, as he’s basked in the glow of his staggering professional success, and he is terrified that he’ll be remembered not as the greatest investigative reporter of the 20th century, but instead as the ultimate reporter as pawn of the truly powerful.
Some folks are journalists, some are fame-seeking hacks.
Voices of Vicious Villainy
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
As we begin a near-seven month nightmare — the 2012 elections — the US of A has become one vast holding pen of pure bullshit, creating an ironic, near-mockery of American democracy.
Not only is the political discourse so freakin’ stupid, sometimes just a pain to watch, but the distortion of so much data is beyond mind bending — and the nasty, self-centered lying coming from the right side of the political mind-set is so staggering, one couldn’t have imagined it even a decade ago.
If fact, events are so saturated with shit, last week the Republican dominated US House passed the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Act, a move that would surely make Twain scream once again, this time from the grave: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.”
Maybe with all that irony in his diet, John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner will have the energy to pitch another hysterical, and completely phony, temper tantrum.
(Illustration found here).
Flying clods of bullshit can be deadly, especially if one ain’t payin’ attention, and even when struck squarely in the face with a big wad of dookie (not to be anywhere-near confused with Dookie), a lot of people are either shocked out of their minds, or really didn’t feel the impact.
Ignorance without humility is most-terrifying, but arrogance born of ignorance is pant-shitting horror.
And even worse are the assholes.
Just yesterday, a well-known total quack, blubbered that Mitt Romney, who’s always called for the US auto industry to go bankrupt and has stood on that point for years, now reveals President Obama’s car-builders’ bailout was actually a Romney idea.
Via Crooks and Liars:
“[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed.
I know it infuriates them to hear that,” Eric Fehrnstrom, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, said.
“The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”
Lying because assholes just don’t care, though, some call it being cynical — Karoli at C&L is more-then right on: ‘This is the cynical Romney campaign at it’s lying-est best.’
And a most-glaring example of the ‘don’t-give-a-shit‘ dysfunction at the heart of this country — nearly all of the disinformation, distorted-delusional data and bullshit has originated from the Republican party, the GOP, postulating the verbiage onto the nowadays: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Of course, Democrats are assholes, too, but absolutely nowhere-near the asshole level of Republicans.
And for reasons I can’t fathom, Democrats can also act like spineless, little turds — and although Obama is hovering near a failed presidency, he’s also nowhere-near an asshole like George Jr.
Obama’s heritage/legacy is that he’s by far the most-disappointing president in US history.
On the posture of the ugliness of the GOP, the MSM appears to have at least allowed some discourse on the subject.
A piece Friday in the Washington Post by Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and titled ‘Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem,’ narrates the plot point, but in ho-hum, MSM fashion — they never come out say these guys are really just a bunch of f*cking assholes, they try to be nice about it.
The commentary should have been written by a Matt Taibbi or a Hunter Thompson — way-more interesting and readable.
Nevertheless, Mann and Ornstein do paint the picture — a few snips:
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.
In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted.
Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.
It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
…
In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.
On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship.
In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.
And in the slosh of last night’s ‘Nerd Prom,’ Mann and Ornstein also slapped at the MSM:
Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views.
Which politician is telling the truth?
Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
Of course, a lot of the shit belched out by the GOP is tolerated by the MSM, or The Villagers, as they’re sometimes called in DC and let a lot of bad stuff slide.
The authors surmise the reason behind this GOP ‘problem‘ as a building factor, starting maybe way back with Roe v. Wade, Prop 13 in 1978 California, and more recently, the rise of hard-right news organizations, yep, Fox News.
Even the actions/policies of just two small turds — Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist — were also cited as reasons behind the bat-shit crazy antics spun into the current GOP ‘problem.’
However, all this ugly didn’t really see the light of day until the 2008 presidential campaign and the arrival of Sarah Palin — all the shit finally had a conduit.
All the ignorant dumb-asses finally had a spokesperson, and even appearing from the get-go as obviously uninformed, but also carrying a simmering mean streak, Palin seemed to reflect that underbelly of US peoples who live off delusion.
And in one of those terrible quirks of historical coincidence, the Tea Party movement appeared to suck Palin’s ignorance right down to the bottom of the glass, and then continued to suck even harder.
Couple that shit with Fox News, and, presto!
Instant bullshit, and tons and tons of it — and the rest is bad-stomach history.
All with startling ferocious array in October 2008: “This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”
Apparently, Palin didn’t even pay attention or even care for her source material for that statement — it was lunacy at best, and just an out-right, manipulated lie at worse.
Either, it’s a bitch.
And then the obvious biggie — “death panels” for President Obama’s health care plan, coined via her Facebook page in August 2009 — and called by fact-checkers at Polififact as the “Lie of the Year.”
Ms Palin’s response: “The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally.”
This opened the door to similar Republican bullshit-tossing, becoming a forerunner of sorts — we all remember about this time last year when slip-knot, jerk-ass Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) slobbered out that abortions were “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”
Kyle’s office then tried to trot it back, claiming Kyle’s crap was not spoken to be taken literally: “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement…” and no matter.
And Rick Santorum in February just shit on the Dutch and their euthanasia laws — inflating, exaggerating, creating an impression of a nightmare land where a fairly-good sized portion of Netherlands people are ‘involuntarily‘ euthanized every year.
Despite evidence to the contrary and creating a small shit-storm in the Netherlands, facts or anything else literally doesn’t matter, Rick was just being himself.
Santorum press secretary Alice Stewart when confronted by Dutch TV: “It’s a matter of what’s in his heart. He’s a strong pro-life person.”
Just say anything you want to, just don’t take it as literal reality — the truth is they’re lying.
These people can’t stand up under any kind of scrutiny — Sarah Palin has had only one real press conference, shortly after the 2008 election and: It was a mess.
The interview with Katie Couric a disaster — revealed too much silly, easily-spouted bullshit.
The face of Palin is Facebook.
(An aside: What about social media? Played a major part four years ago — and how about a Facebook election? People voting online — PCMag reveals possible possibilities).
Palin as a runner-up in Time‘s Person of the Year 2008 — although the rag figured it was an achievement, but way-not the way they intended.
Indeed, if Palin was anywhere near Person of the Year, the ensuing time has ironically posed this as reality:
Hardly anyone saw Palin coming.
The newspapers had to tell readers how to pronounce her name.
The culture war had gone quiet but had not gone away: conservatives had been searching for a soul mate for ages, and it sure wasn’t John McCain; the left was primed for a fight that Barack Obama seemed unwilling to wage.
Women, meanwhile, were wondering what comes next: if Hillary Clinton, the wonky workaholic with her legions of fans, could not capture the White House flag, who was next in line?
Palin broke it all open, even before she headed out to conquer what she termed the “pro-America parts” of America.
She arrived at the bonfire with the tinder stacked high, and somehow it fell to her to be the match.
Among a select cast of runners-up to the 2008 Person of the Year (Barack Obama) — Hank Paulson, Nicolas Sarkozy, Zhang Yimou — Palin has remained about the same — an ignorant loud mouth.
From The Dish in September 2008 and a record already public on Palin lying:
I know the MSM demands that we move on from the fact that someone who could be president next January has a list of public lies so extensive and indisputable that the McCain campaign has still not been able to rebut or even address any one of them, while fencing her off from the press and refusing to hold a press conference to clear the air on so many murky questions of fact that get to the core of whether this person is fit to be vice-president or president.
Read the post which has links to all the lying bullshit.
Despite the obvious, Palin can still wring shit out of nothing.
Last week, she once again took to Facebook and literally distorted a proposed Department of Labor regulation on child labor laws on farms, typing ferociously “if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.”
Another factoid lie: The plan specifically excluded children who work on farms owned or operated by their parents.
Despite reality, the Labor Department nixed the plan late last Thursday after a campaign by a shitload of GOP-influenced assholes (not just Palin) caused a minor political stir in an ugly election year, thus the Obama administration caved.
Not a pretty result, however.
Via HuffPost quoting Norma Flores Lopez, a child farm workers’ advocate at the nonprofit Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs:
“We felt that these were commonsense protections that maintained the traditions of family farms and would have saved many kids’ lives.
We’re sad about it,” said Lopez, who herself was a migrant worker as a child.
“All the misinformation being put out there was really misrepresenting what these rules were.
The benefits were overshadowed.
The ones who will be paying for that is kids.”
Politics is politics, however.
Last night, Obama in his sometimes funny remarks at the Nerd Prom also chided Ms Palin and the distorted gossip-news she winks about and proclaims as truth: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” Obama asked. “A pit bull is delicious.”
No wonder trust in the so-called ‘press’ has plummeted.
Georgetown political scientist Jonathan Ladd at The Monkey Cage (h/t The Dish):
Party polarization has raised the stakes in elections.
And polarization combined with the growth of partisan media options has created an incentive for party leaders and activists to discredit the mainstream media among their supporters.
Party leaders convince their partisans in the mass public to resist informative messages from the mainstream media and ideologically hostile outlets, and instead rely more on ideologically friendly new outlets.
In doing this, they can help to inoculate their supporters against voting for the other side. Polarization created the incentive for political media criticism, but the changing media industry created the opportunity for it to be effective because there were so many non-mainstream media outlets providing alternative messages.
The GOP has gotten good at that shit, and a consequence is delusion, an attribute Republicans seek: A variety of evidence suggests that those who distrust the media are more resistant to new messages about the state of the country, instead relying on their prior beliefs and partisanship to form their current perceptions.
Boy, are we in a fix.